Brent Green, Perpetual and furious refrain/ MATRIX 232

Like every good love story, this one begins with a car crash. Leonard, a clerk in a hardware store, and Mary, a birdkeeper, meet under the force of two large objects colliding into each other. They fall in love as awkwardly as possible and get married. When Mary becomes sick, Leonard tries to save her by turning their rural Appalachian home into a curious healing machine. He bangs on a piano, builds staircases to nowhere, and paints the windows multicolored hues.

Self-taught artist Brent Green’s first feature-length film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010), is included in his exhibition at the UC Berkeley Art Museum MATRIX program. For the film, Green restages the true story of Mary and Leonard Wood in his own backyard. With a similar obsessive spirit, Green constructs five houses, giant music-making machines, angels, and even an eighteen-foot crescent moon for the film’s set. And then he records it. In stop-motion. Green’s signature technique allows for animation of both objects and people. When Leonard causes a flood, kids go fishing in its painted water. When Mary cries, her tears fall like drops of clay. Everything flickers constantly, including the narrator.

Green’s voice falters with cracks and jumps. It leads us on furious, droning rants about god and philosophy. Green’s presence ultimately reminds us that Gravity is not only about inhabiting Leonard and Mary’s life, but about his desire to restage it. The film feels like a dark playhouse where Green and his friends can act out real questions about life.

Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, 2010; still from 16mm film and digital photographs transferred to digital video; color; sound. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York.

At certain points the cast of characters can’t shed their metropolitan archetypes to sustain both the fantasy of the film and Green’s identity as an artist in the back woods of Pennsylvania. The artist is able to move past the cuteness of playing dress-up at moments in which the sets and costumes become hyperbole and indulge in the fantasy of his constructed world.

Green’s exhibition, his West Coast debut, also includes an installation. Larger-than-life painted metal figures form a gothic processional in the MATRIX gallery and a large spinning sound machine that emits the hum of a choir. The real draw, however, is seeing Green’s sculptures on film. The screening room features snippets of Gravity. Here, the gallery-goer gets a teaser of Green’s flickering world, where rivers of nails fall out of a man’s pocket and a woman with twenty-foot legs stretches into the sky. Green’s magical world is made possible on celluloid, in dimly lit fits and starts.

"Brent Green: Perpetual and furious refrain/ MATRIX 232” is on view at the UC Berkeley Art Museum through September 12, 2010. Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then premiered on June 16, 2010 at the PFA Theater.

Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik is an artist, writer, and art editor for Hyphen magazine.